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Rating system of the Royal Navy
The rating system of the Royal Navy and its predecessors were used by the Royal Navy between the beginning of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century to categorise sailing warships, initially classing them according to their assigned complement of men, and later according to the number of their carriage-mounted guns. The rating system of the Royal Navy formally came to an end in the late 19th century by declaration of the Admiralty; rating ships by the number of guns had become obsolete with new types of gun, the introduction of steam propulsion and the use of iron and steel armour.
The first movement towards a English naval rating system began in the early 16th century, when the largest carracks in the Tudor navy, such as Mary Rose, Peter Pomegranate and Henry Grace à Dieu, were denoted as "great ships". This was due only to their size, not to their weight, crew or number of guns. When these carracks were superseded by galleons later in the 16th century, the term "great ship" was used to formally delineate the English navy's largest ships.
The earliest categorisation of Royal Navy ships dates to the reign of King Henry VIII. Henry's navy consisted of 58 ships, and in 1546 the Anthony Roll divided them into four groups: 'ships, galliasses, pinnaces, and row barges.' "
The formal system of dividing up the Navy's combatant warships into a number or groups or "rates", however, only originated in the very early part of the Stuart era, with the first lists of such categorisation appearing around 1604. At this time the combatant ships of the "Navy Royal" were divided up according to the size of the crew they required into four groups:
A 1612 list referred to four groups: royal, middling, small and pinnaces; but defined them by tonnage instead of by guns, starting from 800 to 1200 tons for the ships royal, down to below 250 tons for the pinnaces.
By the early years of King Charles I's reign, these four groups had been renamed to a numerical sequence. The royal ships were now graded as first rank, the great ships as second rank, the middling ships as third rank, and the small ships as fourth rank.[citation needed] Soon afterwards, the structure was again modified, with the term rank now being replaced by rate, and the former small ships now being sub-divided into fourth, fifth and sixth rates.
The earliest rating was based not on the number of guns, but on the established complement (number of men). In 1626, a table drawn up by Charles I used the term rates for the first time in a classification scheme connected with the Navy. The table specified the amount of monthly wages a seaman or officer would earn, in an ordered scheme of six rates, from "first-rate" to "sixth-rate", with each rate divided into two classes, with differing numbers of men assigned to each class. No specific connection with the size of the ship or number of armaments aboard was given in this 1626 table, and as far as is known, this was related exclusively to seaman pay grades.
This classification scheme was substantially altered in late 1653 as the complements of individual ships were raised. From about 1660 the classification moved from one based on the number of men to one based on the number of carriage guns a ship carried.
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Rating system of the Royal Navy
The rating system of the Royal Navy and its predecessors were used by the Royal Navy between the beginning of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century to categorise sailing warships, initially classing them according to their assigned complement of men, and later according to the number of their carriage-mounted guns. The rating system of the Royal Navy formally came to an end in the late 19th century by declaration of the Admiralty; rating ships by the number of guns had become obsolete with new types of gun, the introduction of steam propulsion and the use of iron and steel armour.
The first movement towards a English naval rating system began in the early 16th century, when the largest carracks in the Tudor navy, such as Mary Rose, Peter Pomegranate and Henry Grace à Dieu, were denoted as "great ships". This was due only to their size, not to their weight, crew or number of guns. When these carracks were superseded by galleons later in the 16th century, the term "great ship" was used to formally delineate the English navy's largest ships.
The earliest categorisation of Royal Navy ships dates to the reign of King Henry VIII. Henry's navy consisted of 58 ships, and in 1546 the Anthony Roll divided them into four groups: 'ships, galliasses, pinnaces, and row barges.' "
The formal system of dividing up the Navy's combatant warships into a number or groups or "rates", however, only originated in the very early part of the Stuart era, with the first lists of such categorisation appearing around 1604. At this time the combatant ships of the "Navy Royal" were divided up according to the size of the crew they required into four groups:
A 1612 list referred to four groups: royal, middling, small and pinnaces; but defined them by tonnage instead of by guns, starting from 800 to 1200 tons for the ships royal, down to below 250 tons for the pinnaces.
By the early years of King Charles I's reign, these four groups had been renamed to a numerical sequence. The royal ships were now graded as first rank, the great ships as second rank, the middling ships as third rank, and the small ships as fourth rank.[citation needed] Soon afterwards, the structure was again modified, with the term rank now being replaced by rate, and the former small ships now being sub-divided into fourth, fifth and sixth rates.
The earliest rating was based not on the number of guns, but on the established complement (number of men). In 1626, a table drawn up by Charles I used the term rates for the first time in a classification scheme connected with the Navy. The table specified the amount of monthly wages a seaman or officer would earn, in an ordered scheme of six rates, from "first-rate" to "sixth-rate", with each rate divided into two classes, with differing numbers of men assigned to each class. No specific connection with the size of the ship or number of armaments aboard was given in this 1626 table, and as far as is known, this was related exclusively to seaman pay grades.
This classification scheme was substantially altered in late 1653 as the complements of individual ships were raised. From about 1660 the classification moved from one based on the number of men to one based on the number of carriage guns a ship carried.